Free Yourself from Email Spam!

Americans waste valuable time deleting spam! How do you keep spam off your net? 

According to Americans surveyed by McAfee: 

• Email spam is the No. 1 technology time waster (49%) by wide margins over other tech annoyances including automated voice response systems (24%) and slow Internet connections (19%).  

• 49% of Americans spend more than 40 minutes per week deleting spam, with 14% reporting they spend as much as three and a half hours a week -- or 7.5 days per year -- on this task. 

Email Spam has grown from a nuisance to a full-blown Internet threat. Consider these alarming statistics:

Email Spam most Frequently Asked Questions:

• What is unsolicited commercial email (aka "spam")? 

Marketers see email as a quick and cheap way to promote their goods and services. Many companies send highly targeted email to users who have opted-in to receive these messages. Typically, these messages are of interest to the user. Examples of these include newsletters and notifications of sales and/or promotions to specific goods or services. Ensuring the privacy of the user, companies will place an “unsubscribe” mechanism that will effectively take the user off future mailing lists.

Unsolicited commercial email (UCE or “spam”) is sent to users without their expressed permission. Currently, the amount of spam a user receives on a daily basis easily outnumbers the number of legitimate email. Many times, spammers will provide a fake “opt-out” button in the message that is either a “dead” link or a way to confirm with the spammer that the email address is valid for future mailings. Email spam is a proliferating Internet problem. Last year, an estimated 2.3 billion spam messages were sent on a daily basis. This number is expected to jump to an astounding 14.5 billion by the end of 2006!

• Why should I care about email spam? 

Inbox Pollution

Within a business environment, critical email addresses, e.g. “sales@” or “support@” can fall victim to inbox pollution. Spammers can overload a critical email address with so much spam that the address is essentially rendered unusable.

Internet Fraud

On first glance, many unsolicited commercial offers may seem both legitimate and compelling. Unfortunately, these offers lead to deceptive Web sites, set up to capture credit card information for the purposes of online fraud. According to a study by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 66% of all spam email they collected contained false “From” lines, “Subject” lines, and message text.

Unsuitable Content

Spam email can disguise itself with harmless subject lines, only to reveal economy vitural dedicatedographic material within the message body. While preventing children from viewing unsuitable content is important for parents, businesses must also address the legal liabilities associated with economy vitural dedicatedographic material being sent to an employee’s inbox 

• How do email spammers get my email address? 

Every time you send your email address out into the world, you are exposing yourself and your business to the deluge of spam email. To make the problem worse, email lists are also sold and resold within spammer networks, greatly increasing the volume of spam sent to a user’s email address.

Email Harvesting 

Spammers employ simple but effective tactics to harvest email addresses from the Internet. Using free spider software, spammers get access to email addresses without a user’s consent. 

Consumer Tips to Prevent Email Spam 

• Beware of purchasing spam-advertised products. Aside from encouraging spammers, this makes more personally identifiable information (e.g. name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, etc.) available to them. It also can guarantee that you'll get more spam.

• Refrain from clicking on Reply or Remove! Some senders may remove your address, but others may flag your email address as "live" and send you more spam or even sell your address to other spammers. Instead, forward spam to the Federal Trade Commission at uce@ftc.gov 

• Use a "public" email address when online. Setup and use a "public" email address, which may either be an additional address from your ISP or a free Web-based email address. Use this email address when participating in newsgroups, joining contests or anytime that your email is requested by a third party online. Potential spam will go to your "public" email address instead of your "private" email address.

• Don't post your email address online. You'd be surprised how often you use your email address for newsletter subscriptions, in chat rooms or to join online groups. Before you post your email address, know whether it will be displayed or used. Then use a "public" email address when necessary.

Link2City helps you to combat spam

we offer a content filtering system by Imail, an Ipswitch product

Ipswitch is continuing to advance in the fight against spam by defeating the latest spammer tricks and improving the effectiveness of white lists. The latest version of IMail Server contains many new features and enhancements:

- Improved Usability
Logs throughout IMail now use a single message ID for a message making it easier to track a message as it passes through various tests and processes. Messages flagged as spam can now include this ID in the header. The anti-spam UI options make it easier to configure.

- Increased Effectiveness
Added subject modification allows for messages flagged as spam to include a warning in the subject making it easier for some email clients to quarantine or delete messages flagged as spam.

Also added is the the ability to move messages flagged as spam to a subfolder and the ability to use the same phrase list to search subject, body, or both. What's more you can also have IMail Server normalize words so that it can remove non-alphabetic characters from a word and use that in content filtering.

- Better Prevention of False Positives
Spam checks can now automatically be skipped for trusted relay IP addresses. Trusted IP addresses, white lists by domain, and white lists by email address are all in the same location and can apply to connection filtering and content filtering.

- New Word Normalization Feature
The addition of word normalization can dramatically increase the effectiveness of anti-spam filters by stopping tricks such as putting periods between each letter in an attempt to fool spam filters (example: r.e.f.i.n.a.n.c.e). Word normalization removes any non-alphabetic characters within a word prior to applying Bayesian Statistical Filtering or Phrase Filtering. The same phrase list can now be applied to both the subject and body, decreasing administration time.

Anti-Spam Features

Connection Filtering

• Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBL) lists third party services that include domain names and IP addresses of known spammers; Comes with 5 free RBL lists by default and can be configured with additional ones by the administrator like ORDB or MAPS.
• Verify the MAIL FROM validates that the MAIL FROM address actually exists.
• Perform Reverse DNS Lookup verifies the DNS record for the sending servers IP address.
• Verify the EHLO/HELO domain validates that the sending mail server domain exists in DNS.
• Kill Lists (block by domain or email address)
• Trusted IP Addresses

Content Filtering

• Bayesian statistical filters use spam’s characteristics against itself. Words are analyzed based on how frequently they appear in good email versus bad email. Then the message is assigned a probability of being spam.

Read Math to fight spam; an article about Bayesian filtering written by Mark Gibbs of Network World

• Phrase Filtering searches for phrases in the body of the messages.
•   Trusted IP Addresses & White Lists of trusted e-mail or IP addresses that will allow messages through, minimizing false positives.
• Advanced HTML Filtering
  (new in version 8.01 - released 7/2/03)
  • Detects nested tables, hyperlinks, images, scripts, invalid tags, mailto links, deceptive URLs, and embedded comments
  • Blacklists URLs that appear in spam messages (most spam emails contain a call to action to visit a web page and these URLs can now easily be blocked)
  • Removes the HTML tags prior to the statistical analysis of the words in the message (useful when dealing with embedded comments or invalid tags that are used to intentionally confuse statistical filters)

Delivery Rules

New outbound rules capability helps administrators eliminate obscene language and stop confidential information from going out. Combination rules help prevent viruses from entering the network and  they cut down on spam. And you can also reduce spam by disallowing the creation of subfolders that are often byproducts of spam

Delete and prevent junk e-mail, route important messages based on headers and contents, and/or stop hostile e-mail viruses

Too much mail all in your Inbox?  IMail's delivery rules let you sort mail into different mailboxes or just delete it, based on its headers or contents.  Delivery rules include:

• Scan the message Header (To, From, Sender, Subject) or the body text
• "Contains" and "Does Not Contain" logic
• Deliver mail to existing or new mailboxes, or delete it
• Pattern matching with regular expressions for finding near matches or matching more than one string
• Finding specific file types, such as the .vbs files associated with the "lovebug" viruses
• Eliminate obscene language 
• Stop confidential information from going out and viruses from spreading
• Provides the ability to limit e-mail usage.

IMail Server has the ability to apply delivery rules for a particular host or for individual users. For example, you could create a file of spam-filtering rules and apply it at the host level, and users could also create their own personal rules.  Here are some examples:

• If FROM doesn't contain "@ipswitch.com" move message to "LowPriority" mailbox
• If SUBJECT contains "get rich quick" delete message
• if BODY contains "(wsftp|ws_ftp)" move message to "WS_FTP" mailbox

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